Dirty by Holly Bars, published by Yaffle Press
Reviewed by Asylum’s poetry editor, Janine Booth
In Dirty, Holly Bars has created an extraordinary, mighty, courageous, poetic record of child sexual abuse and of the ways in which survivors are traumatised and failed.
If she had told her story in prose, it would have been horrifying, and she might have struggled to find a balance of facts and feelings. Using poetry instead has enabled Holly to tell her story in a way that gives a nuanced, descriptive and powerful account.
Beginning in her ‘Room of My Own’, adult Holly introduces her story through the lens of the trauma that it still causes her. The poems that follow walk us through her story of pain, telling each part and each feeling in the format that best suits it.
Many – including ‘Here’s a Top Tip’, ‘The Grief is Long’ and ‘Playtime’s Over’ – are prose poems, renouncing rhyme and metre in favour of a stream of argument, emphasising that distress often expresses itself not in neatly-structured stanzas but in outpourings. One of these prose poems, ‘Grooming’, shows the two meanings of the word taking place simultaneously.
Several poems refer to the title of the collection, explaining how the abuse made the victim feel dirty. Others illustrate how the abuser made her rewrite her memories (‘How I Came to Hate My Mother’), how the blame was systematically placed on the child (‘Scapegoat’), and the way in which her own home was not a place of safety (‘Force Feeding’ and ‘Family Bathroom’).
Others choose a shape that reflects the theme of the poem, such as the narrow column of ‘Trimming’.
Imagery, emotion and bare, shocking facts are mixed together in a way that makes each of them all the more striking. As the reader progresses through the poems, they discover what happened to the poet as a child, in words that capture the brutality. They tell of her interactions with the authorities, including ‘The Interview’ with the police; ‘Scored’, the decision not to press criminal charges as the abuse scored too low; and ‘It Wasn’t Rape’ because the abuser was female.
I Visit CAMHS at Seventeen
The therapist still works here. I found the address from a letter header
Holly Bars
they forgot to blank out on my social file. She says hello and I don’t
recognise her: hair, white; glasses, designer; face, old. She says I
remember you. How are you doing? Like she knows me. I don’t know
what to say, other than the truth. I’ve got psychosis; I ran away; I’ve
thought about killing myself every day since I was ten. She’s
satisfied. Yes, I remember you is her reply. She gives me pictures I
drew with her, says I’m lucky, because in a few months they would’ve
been shredded. The drawings are disappointingly ordinary. I tell her
I had my first flashback at fourteen. My mum never touched me. It
was her. Still, there’s no shock; her face is belief. I see hundreds of
families every year, and it’s been twelve years. Do you know why I
remember you? – and I wait for the words, hoping she will say
something to flatter my vanity – Because it was happening right in
front of my face, and yet, there seemed to be nothing anyone could
do about it.
There is an occasional break from the grinding abuse, for example when Holly gets to visit ‘The Beck by Grandma’s house’. And there is hope as well as pain in ‘I Had to Relearn love’ and ‘The Man Who Helped’. Holly acknowledges this in ‘Rough Draft’, which shows the benefit to her of writing her experiences into this collection: ‘And still, this story is not at all sad; it is a testament of spine-breaking will. And now, I can unwrite myself’.
Dirty is available from Yaffle Press.
